Which AI company do consumers trust the most?
Month one of the Humans in the Loop Trust Index
Meta is the least trusted AI company in the United States. It is also the least trusted AI company in the United Kingdom. Different countries. Different cultures. Same answer.
This probably does not surprise you. It does not surprise me either. Nobody voted for Mark Zuckerberg, and yet he controls the AI strategy for three billion users. I have written before about the case against Meta’s AI approach. In my opinion, Meta has earned its position at the top of the mistrust list.
Introducing the Humans in the Loop Trust Index
We asked a panel of 240 people across the US and the UK which AI companies they trust and which ones they don’t.
We will be running this every month, tracking how trust shifts as these companies make decisions, launch products, and inevitably do things that make us think about their role in shaping the future.
Google and OpenAI top the list of most trusted AI companies
[CHART: Which AI company do you trust the most?]
Google leads trust in the US at 44%. OpenAI leads in the UK at 43%. Microsoft holds third place in both countries.
The interesting finding here is OpenAI. It tops trust in the UK despite the Pentagon controversy in late February, when OpenAI struck a deal with the US Department of Defense just hours after Anthropic was blacklisted for refusing to allow its AI to be used for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons. Sam Altman himself admitted the deal was rushed. Staff resigned. Claude overtook ChatGPT in the App Store.
And yet. OpenAI still leads trust in the UK. In the US, where the story landed harder, Google takes the top spot.
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Meta and DeepSeek are the least trusted AI companies
[CHART: Which AI company do you trust the least?]
Meta. Then DeepSeek. Then it diverges: xAI takes third in the US, while Anthropic takes third in the UK at 16%.
Anthropic had a strong start to 2026
Anthropic refused the Pentagon’s terms on surveillance and weapons. It got blacklisted by the US government for it. Public opinion swung behind it. It launched Claude Cowork, which I think is one of the most significant AI product launches this year. And it had a brilliant March more broadly.
Yet Anthropic barely registers in the trust rankings. 6% in the US and 3% in the UK ranked it as the most trusted AI company. It will be worth watching whether Anthropic’s strong positioning translates into trust over the coming months.
What comes next
New data every month. Same questions. Same panel size. If trust shifts, the data will show it.
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If you know any leaders or senior professionals who want to build their AI fluency, then please get them to check out my CPD Certified AI Fluency course where I teach the six dimensions of AI fluency - and keeping up to date with what these AI companies are getting up to is one of them!
Interesting part isn’t who people trust.
It’s why.
Most users don’t evaluate models directly.
They evaluate outcomes.
If outputs feel:
→ inconsistent
→ overconfident
→ hard to verify
trust drops, regardless of the company.
And right now, most people are still using AI in a way that produces exactly those problems.
Single prompt.
Single output.
No validation.
So the experience feels unreliable.
The shift happens when usage changes:
→ structured prompts
→ cross-checking
→ multi-tool workflows
That’s when AI starts feeling trustworthy in practice.
Been working on a system around that shift:
https://shorturl.at/nE0Tw
Heather, have you looked into GB1 (formerly Locai) by Locai Labs? They're focused on UK-sovereign AI, and have just announced Project Mercury to build the UK's first sovereign frontier models? https://locailabs.com/blog/locai-labs-and-civo-unveil-project-mercury-the-uks-first-family-of-sovereign-frontier-models
I think we all need to plan for disentangling ourselves from OpenAI and maybe even Google.